Erwin Panofsky

Erwin Panofsky (Hanover, 1892 – Princeton, 1968) was one of the most influential art historians of the twentieth century. German by training and American by exile, he helped establish iconography and iconology as rigorous methods for reading images in light of their historical setting, their textual sources and the ideas of their time.

Born into a prosperous Jewish family, he began studying law in Berlin before turning to art history, drawn in part by lectures on Dürer. He earned his doctorate in 1914 with a study of Dürer's art theory. In 1920 he qualified as a university lecturer in Hamburg, where he taught until 1933. When the Nazis took power, he lost his post because of his Jewish background and emigrated to the United States, where he had already taught as a visiting professor. From 1935 he worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and he also taught at Harvard and New York University.

His approach rested on a simple but demanding idea: an artwork should be read on three levels, the visible form, the conventional themes and symbols it carries, and the deeper meaning it expresses for a particular culture. He applied this to the Renaissance, to medieval art and to early Netherlandish painting. Working with Raymond Klibansky and Fritz Saxl, he traced melancholy as a recurring theme in European culture. His essays on perspective, understood as a symbolic form specific to each era, and on Gothic architecture and scholastic thought, made him known as a thinker as well as a scholar.

His legacy is twofold. He trained scholars who consolidated iconology as a discipline, and his writings remain essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how images, ideas and beliefs relate to one another.